Swedish Death Metal - Softcover

Ekeroth, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 097961631X ISBN 13: 9780979616310

Publisher: Bazillion Points, 2008

Synopsis

Sweden is a remote country in the freezing northern Europe, with less than nine million inhabitants and a reputation for Volvos, hockey players, cheap furniture, vodka, and blonde women. Since the late 1980s, however, Sweden has produced over a thousand extreme heavy metal bands, creating one of the most respected regional music scenes in the world. This is the improbable history of how a marginalized teen movement crawled from Sweden's small towns and suburbs, and found a lasting place on the world stage. Daniel Ekeroth captures the epic tale with enlightening detail, beginning with Sweden's violent loss of innocence in the 1980s, through the metal's virtual chokehold on the country during the 1990s into the lasting legacy and influence in the turbulent 2000s of the Sunlight guitar tone, the "Gothenburg Sound," and the countless offshoots of Sweden's most lethal cultural export.

This ultimate blow-by-blow account of Sweden’s legendary death metal underground is based on exclusive interviews with members of Nihilist/ Entombed, In Flames, At the Gates, Dismember, Grave, Hypocrisy, Opeth, Unleashed, Marduk, Morbid, Mob 47, Deranged, Edge of Sanity, Merciless, Therion, Liers in Wait, Carnage, Carcass, Tiamat/Treblinka, Afflicted, Repugnant, and the Haunted.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel Ekeroth is a death metal musician. He plays in the bands Insision and Tyrant, and is a past member of Dellamorte and Diskonto. He is also author of Violent Italy and Swedish Exploitation Cinema.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Death Metal musician and author Ekeroth (Violent Italy) shows a true fan's dedication in this oral history/band index of the thunderous music scene that emerged from frozen, sparsely-populated Sweden in the '80s and early '90s. In his introduction, Ekeroth explains the youth phenomenon that was Swedish Death Metal (it sounds pretty much like you would think) as natural in a country "generally made up of extremely small and boring towns." He writes: "In the small and worthless town of Avesta where I grew up, there were metal bands in every garage, school, and youth center," he writes. Without sensationalizing SDM's dark, flamboyant lyrics, Ekeroth traces the movement that produced more than a thousand bands, from proto-genre "thrash metal" (more punk) to bastard offshoots like "black metal" (more makeup, less fun), through interviews with the musicians, tape-traders and fanzine writers who were there. The furious scene, made up almost entirely of frustrated and disaffected teenagers, would echo the '70s punk revolution in New York and explode with the same powder-keg intensity, before eventually spawning "ridiculously well established" years that meant the death of Death. Maybe worth the price alone is the appendix, an "A to Z of Swedish Death Metal Bands," which features brief profiles and discographies (with Ekeroth's opinions) of every known SDM band, from world-famous At the Gates ("all their albums are classic masterpieces") to Slakt (just one 2005 demo, "probably nerds"). More than 500 black and white photos and illus.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bazillion Points
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 097961631X
• ISBN 13: 9780979616310
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 450